Motivational Quotes

Music

The manner in which Americans consume music has a lot to do with leaving it on their coffee tables, or using it as wallpaper for their lifestyles, like the score of a movie --it's consumed that way without any regard for how and why it's made.

- Zappa, Frank

Best Quotes about Music

Music is the vernacular of the human soul.

Latham, Geoffrey

Music of all the arts has the most influence on the passions and the legislator should give it the greatest encouragement.

Bonaparte, Napoleon

Music is a beautiful opiate, if you don't take it too seriously.

Miller, Henry

The pleasure we feel in music springs from the obedience which is in it.

Thoreau, Henry David

Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze By the sweet power of music: therefore the poet Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones and floods; Since nought so stockish, hard and full of rage, But music for the time doth change his nature. The man that hath no music in himself, Nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, Is fit for treasons, stratagems and spoils.

William Shakespeare

Don't play what's there, play what's not there.

Davis, Miles

Music is the movement of sound to reach the soul for the education of its virtue.

Plato

I like Beethoven, especially the poems.

Starr, Ringo

Music is essentially useless, as life is: but both have an ideal extension which lends utility to its conditions.

George Santayana

10.

I think my fans will follow me into our combined old age. Real musicians and real fans stay together for a long, long time.

Raitt, Bonnie

11.

Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Thomas, Lewis

12.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

13.

We are aware that the conductor is not really making the music, it is making him -- if he is relaxed, open and attuned, then the invisible will take possession of him; through him, it will reach us.

Brook, Peter (Stephen Paul)

14.

Words are poor interpreters in the realms of emotion. When all words end, music begins; when they suggest, it realizes; and hence is the secret of its strange, inexpressible power.

Haweis, H. R.

15.

My heart, which is so full to overflowing, has often been solaced and refreshed by music when sick and weary.

Martin Luther

16.

A song will outlive all sermons in the memory.

Giles, Henry

17.

If anyone has conducted a Beethoven performance, and then doesn't have to go to an osteopath, then there's something wrong.

Rattle, Simon

18.

Canned music is like audible wallpaper.

Cooke, Alistair

19.

In sweet music is such art: killing care and grief of heart fall asleep, or hearing, die.

William Shakespeare

20.

Without music, life is a journey through a desert.

Conroy, Pat

21.

Hearing often-times the still, sad music of humanity, nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power to chasten and subdue.

Wordsworth, William

22.

I know only two tunes. One them is Yankee Doodle and the other isn't.

Grant, Ulysses S.

23.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Whiteman, Paul

24.

Nothing separates the generations more than music. By the time a child is eight or nine, he has developed a passion for his own music that is even stronger than his passions for procrastination and weird clothes.

Cosby, Bill

25.

All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.

Cocteau, Jean

26.

Music should strike fire from the heart of man, and bring tears form the eyes of woman.

Beethoven, Ludwig Van

27.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Addison, Joseph

28.

Great music is that which penetrates the ear with facility and leaves the memory with difficulty. Magical music never leaves the memory.

Beecham, Sir Thomas

29.

If a thing isn't worth saying, you sing it.

Pierre Beaumarchais

30.

When Mozart was composing at the end of the eighteenth century, the city of Vienna was so quiet that fire alarms could be given verbally, by a shouting watchman mounted on top of St. Stefan's Cathedral. In twentieth-century society, the noise level is such that it keeps knocking our bodies out of tune and out of their natural rhythms. This ever-increasing assault of sound upon our ears, minds, and bodies adds to the stress load of civilized beings trying to live in a highly complex environment.

Halpern, Steven

31.

A symphony is a stage play with the parts written for instruments instead of for actors.

Wilson, Colin

32.

A woman's two cents worth is worth two cents in the music business.

Lynn, Loretta

33.

There is two kinds of music the good and bad. I play the good kind.

Armstrong, Louis

34.

Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.

Camus, Albert

35.

If we were all determined to play the first violin we should never have an ensemble. Therefore, respect every musician in his proper place.

Schumann, Robert

36.

But then there's a moment like tonight, a profound and transcendent experience, the feeling as if a door has opened, and it's all because of that instrument, that incredible, magical instrument.

Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider

37.

Music is good to the melancholy, bad to those who mourn, and neither good or bad to the deaf.

Spinoza, Baruch (Benedict de)

38.

Music is the fourth great material want, first food, then clothes, then shelter, then music.

Bovee, Christian Nevell

39.

The author's conviction on this day of New Year is that music begins to atrophy when it departs too far from the dance; that poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music; but this must not be taken as implying that all good music is dance music or all poetry lyric. Bach and Mozart are never too far from physical movement.

Pound, Ezra

40.

Among all men on the earth bards have a share of honor and reverence, because the muse has taught them songs and loves the race of bards.

Homer

41.

Give me a laundry list and I'll set it to music.

Rossini, Gioacchino Antonio

42.

Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.

Durrell, Lawrence

43.

I can't listen to that much Wagner. I start getting the urge to conquer Poland.

Woody Allen

44.

The man that hath no music in himself, nor is not moved with concord of sweet sounds, is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. The motions of his spirit are dull as night, and his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.

Shakespeare, William

45.

It was called the Backstreet Market, and it was just like a local hangout. That was where the kids would drive their cars, hang out with their convertibles and listen to music. That's how we got Backstreet. We put Boys on it, because no matter how old we get, we'll always be boys.

Richardson, Kevin

46.

One is hardly sensible of fatigue while he marches to music.

Carlyle, Thomas

47.

They said, You have a blue guitar, you do not play things as they are. The man replied, Things as they are changed upon a blue guitar.

Stevens, Wallace

48.

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.

Keats, John

49.

I've always felt rock and roll was very, very wholesome music.

Franklin, Aretha

50.

We fight our way through the massed and leveled collective safe taste of the Top 40, just looking for a little something we can call our own. But when we find it and jam the radio to hear it again it isn't just ours -- it is a link to thousands of others who are sharing it with us. As a matter of a single song this might mean very little; as culture, as a way of life, you can't beat it.

Marcus, Greil